240Z: Cranking up the Z Project again

Good news. The Z project is back! Well it was never gone and i’ve been continuously working on it, but due to an management education i had on the weekend for the past two years, a big step forward in my job and many other things in life, the project was progressing much slower than i wished. But i’m a guy to make long-term plans and i’ve always had the plan to get things done when life allows me to. So here we are. My school is completed. Well i still have my exams in mid april so i’m working hard on that, but until then that and my job will still occupy most of my free time. The advantage of my new job position is that i earn some more money and in the meantime i’ve saved some especially to complete this project. I’ve also really longing to get back into the garge and get my hands greasy. Over the past weeks i’ve been looking for a bodyshop to complete the work. The old one was OK, but there was a bit of a difficulty when it came to communication and it was always a side-project for the bodyshop, which was earning money with small repairs, insurrance cases and fixer-upper projects of US-cars. He had a strong history in japanese cars, but i had the feeling he lost a bit of interest in my project. The other thing is – he was a talented panel-beater, but didn’t have the tools himself, so whenever he had to bend some sheetmetal, he had to go to his friends shop. this was time consuming and i had the feeling i paid for much of it. So i decided instead to go to a more upperclass Oldtimer specialist, which usually deals with cars in a different price range. I was asking around and got some good tips. Finally i have a nice bloke coming over to check out the car and details in the coming days. we’ll see how that turns out. so far i have a very good feeling. But i also started to collect all the panels required to complete the project

Yes, puzzle time 🙂 Only the box section on the LH side is missing, but i hope the panelbuilder can make this himself.

Labor is expensive in switzerland, so i decided to get these ready-made patch panels from the US, to delete the US-spec turn signal holes on the US spec rear quarter panel, which i got. Why pay a dude an hour of work to measre and create such a panel, i can buy a ptch piece for 20 bucks?

Additionally a collected a few NOS items from some nice guys.- like an original hood hinge:

And a complete choke cable assembly (ok, this one isused, but in almost mint condition!):

and some more parts. Engine gasket kit, Starter solenoid, Rectifier diode, SU carb gasket kit and a wheel bearing:

I also (again) bought a nice set of vintage swiss Datsun stickers. You may have seen them before, but the special one in this set is the white one:

Its from the early 70ies and the slogan “Datsun bringt neue Werte” (Datsun brings new values) was used on many of the original Swiss Datsun (240Z) Documentation:

Here is an 1971 advertizing where you could order above stickers for free (see center)

I also found this nice swiss Datsun keychain from the early eighties. it was cheap, so i had to have it 🙂

From the same era is this 1984 Datsun / Nissan brochure, which i will use for my Datsun switzerland chronicles story which i’m working on. The swiss Prince / PMC Mikado pricelist from 1966 has already been added to the “Prince” part of the story

For the coming “commercial vehicle” chapter, i obtained a few nice and rarer brochures of commercial vehicles, like this datsun Homer, King-cab, Urvan, and Vanette brochures:

That’s it for today. I have some more documents for the story on the way currently, and also a nice JDM-only piece for the Z is on the way from Japan. so stay tuned for more news soon…